A Dreamer\'s Tales

L >> Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett] >> A Dreamer\'s Tales

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But the second time that I came I thought there was something ominous
about the field.

Down there among the king-cups by the little shallow stream I felt that
something terrible might happen in just such a place.

I did not stay long there, because I thought that too much time spent in
London had brought on these morbid fancies and I went on to the hills as
fast as I could.

I stayed for some days in the country air, and when I came back I went to
the field again to enjoy that peaceful spot before entering London. But
there was still something ominous among the osiers.

A year elapsed before I went there again. I emerged from the shadow of
London into the gleaming sun; the bright green grass and the king-cups
were flaming in the light, and the little stream was singing a happy song.
But the moment I stepped into the field my old uneasiness returned, and
worse than before. It was as though the shadow was brooding there of some
dreadful future thing and a year had brought it nearer.

I reasoned that the exertion of bicycling might be bad for one, and that
the moment one rested this uneasiness might result.

A little later I came back past the field by night, and the song of the
stream in the hush attracted me down to it. And there the fancy came to me
that it would be a terribly cold place to be in the starlight, if for some
reason one was hurt and could not get away.

I knew a man who was minutely acquainted with the past history of that
locality, and him I asked if anything historical had ever happened in that
field. When he pressed me for my reason in asking him this, I said that
the field had seemed to me such a good place to hold a pageant in. But he
said that nothing of any interest had ever occurred there, nothing at all.

So it was from the future that the field's terrible trouble came.

For three years off and on I made visits to the field, and every time more
clearly it boded evil things, and my uneasiness grew more acute every time
that I was lured to go and rest among the cool green grass under the
beautiful osiers. Once to distract my thoughts I tried to gauge how fast
the stream was trickling, but I found myself wondering if it flowed faster
than blood.

I felt that it would be a terrible place to go mad in, one would hear
voices.

At last I went to a poet whom I knew, and woke him from huge dreams, and
put before him the whole case of the field. He had not been out of London
all that year, and he promised to come with me and look at the field, and
tell me what was going to happen there. It was late in July when we went.
The pavement, the air, the houses and the dirt had been all baked dry by
the summer, the weary traffic dragged on, and on, and on, and Sleep
spreading her wings soared up and floated from London and went to walk
beautifully in rural places.

When the poet saw the field he was delighted, the flowers were out in
masses all along the stream, he went down to the little wood rejoicing. By
the side of the stream he stood and seemed very sad. Once or twice he
looked up and down it mournfully, then he bent and looked at the
king-cups, first one and then another, very closely, and shaking his head.

For a long while he stood in silence, and all my old uneasiness returned,
and my bodings for the future.

And then I said, "What manner of field is it?"

And he shook his head sorrowfully.

"It is a battlefield," he said.

THE DAY OF THE POLL

In the town by the sea it was the day of the poll, and the poet regarded
it sadly when he woke and saw the light of it coming in at his window
between two small curtains of gauze. And the day of the poll was
beautifully bright; stray bird-songs came to the poet at the window; the
air was crisp and wintry, but it was the blaze of sunlight that had
deceived the birds. He heard the sound of the sea that the moon led up the
shore, dragging the months away over the pebbles and shingles and piling
them up with the years where the worn-out centuries lay; he saw the
majestic downs stand facing mightily south-wards; saw the smoke of the
town float up to their heavenly faces--column after column rose calmly
into the morning as house by house was waked by peering shafts of the
sunlight and lit its fires for the day; column by column went up toward
the serene downs' faces, and failed before they came there and hung all
white over houses; and every one in the town was raving mad.

It was a strange thing that the poet did, for he hired the largest motor
in the town and covered it with all the flags he could find, and set out
to save an intelligence. And he presently found a man whose face was hot,
who shouted that the time was not far distant when a candidate, whom he
named, would be returned at the head of the poll by a thumping majority.
And by him the poet stopped and offered him a seat in the motor that was
covered with flags. When the man saw the flags that were on the motor, and
that it was the largest in the town, he got in. He said that his vote
should be given for that fiscal system that had made us what we are, in
order that the poor man's food should not be taxed to make the rich man
richer. Or else it was that he would give his vote for that system of
tariff reform which should unite us closer to our colonies with ties that
should long endure, and give employment to all. But it was not to the
polling-booth that the motor went, it passed it and left the town and came
by a small white winding road to the very top of the downs. There the poet
dismissed the car and let that wondering voter on to the grass and seated
himself on a rug. And for long the voter talked of those imperial
traditions that our forefathers had made for us and which he should uphold
with his vote, or else it was of a people oppressed by a feudal system
that was out of date and effete, and that should be ended or mended. But
the poet pointed out to him small, distant, wandering ships on the sunlit
strip of sea, and the birds far down below them, and the houses below the
birds, with the little columns of smoke that could not find the downs.

And at first the voter cried for his polling-booth like a child; but after
a while he grew calmer, save when faint bursts of cheering came twittering
up to the downs, when the voter would cry out bitterly against the
misgovernment of the Radical party, or else it was--I forget what the poet
told me--he extolled its splendid record.

"See," said the poet, "these ancient beautiful things, the downs and the
old-time houses and the morning, and the grey sea in the sunlight going
mumbling round the world. And this is the place they have chosen to go man
in!"

And standing there with all broad England behind him, rolling northward,
down after down, and before him the glittering sea too far for the sound
of the roar of it, there seemed to the voter to grow less important the
questions that troubled the town. Yet he was still angry.

"Why did you bring me here?" he said again.

"Because I grew lonely," said the poet, "when all the town went mad."

Then he pointed out to the voter some old bent thorns, and showed him the
way that a wind had blown for a million years, coming up at dawn from the
sea; and he told him of the storms that visit the ships, and their names
and whence they come, and the currents they drive afield, and the way that
the swallows go. And he spoke of the down where they sat, when the summer
came, and the flowers that were not yet, and the different butterflies,
and about the bats and the swifts, and the thoughts in the heart of man.
He spoke of the aged windmill that stood on the down, and of how to
children it seemed a strange old man who was only dead by day. And as he
spoke, and as the sea-wind blew on that high and lonely place, there began
to slip away from the voter's mind meaningless phrases that had crowded it
long--thumping majority--victory in the fight--terminological
inexactitudes--and the smell of paraffin lamps dangling in heated
schoolrooms, and quotations taken from ancient speeches because the words
were long. They fell away, though slowly, and slowly the voter saw a wider
world and the wonder of the sea. And the afternoon wore on, and the winter
evening came, and the night fell, and all black grew the sea, and about
the time that the stars come blinking out to look upon our littleness, the
polling-booth closed in the town.

When they got back the turmoil was on the wane in the streets; night hid
the glare of the posters; and the tide, finding the noise abated and being
at the flow, told an old tale that he had learned in his youth about the
deeps of the sea, the same which he had told to coastwise ships that
brought it to Babylon by the way of Euphrates before the doom of Troy.

I blame my friend the poet, however lonely he was, for preventing this man
from registering his vote (the duty of every citizen); but perhaps it
matters less, as it was a foregone conclusion, because the losing
candidate, either through poverty or sheer madness, had neglected to
subscribe to a single football club.

THE UNHAPPY BODY

"Why do you not dance with us and rejoice with us?" they said to a certain
body. And then that body made the confession of its trouble. It said: "I
am united with a fierce and violent soul, that is altogether tyrannous and
will not let me rest, and he drags me away from the dances of my kin to
make me toil at his detestable work; and he will not let me do the little
things, that would give pleasure to the folk I love, but only cares to
please posterity when he has done with me and left me to the worms; and
all the while he makes absurd demands of affection from those that are
near to me, and is too proud even to notice any less than he demands, so
that those that should be kind to me all hate me." And the unhappy body
burst into tears.

And they said: "No sensible body cares for its soul. A soul is a little
thing, and should not rule a body. You should drink and smoke more till he
ceases to trouble you." But the body only wept, and said, "Mine is a
fearful soul. I have driven him away for a little while with drink. But he
will soon come back. Oh, he will soon come back!"

And the body went to bed hoping to rest, for it was drowsy with drink. But
just as sleep was near it, it looked up, and there was its soul sitting on
the windowsill, a misty blaze of light, and looking into the river.

"Come," said the tyrannous soul, "and look into the street."

"I have need of sleep," said the body.

"But the street is a beautiful thing," the soul said vehemently; "a
hundred of the people are dreaming there."

"I am ill through want of rest," the body said.

"That does not matter," the soul said to it. "There are millions like you
in the earth, and millions more to go there. The people's dreams are
wandering afield; they pass the seas and mountains of faery, threading the
intricate passes led by their souls; they come to golden temples a-ring
with a thousand bells; they pass up steep streets lit by paper lanterns,
where the doors are green and small; they know their way to witches'
chambers and castles of enchantment; they know the spell that brings them
to the causeway along the ivory mountains--on one side looking downward
they behold the fields of their youth and on the other lie the radiant
plains of the future. Arise and write down what the people dream."

"What reward is there for me," said the body, "if I write down what you
bid me?"

"There is no reward," said the soul.

"Then I shall sleep," said the body.

And the soul began to hum an idle song sung by a young man in a fabulous
land as he passed a golden city (where fiery sentinels stood), and knew
that his wife was within it, though as yet but a little child, and knew by
prophecy that furious wars, not yet arisen in far and unknown mountains,
should roll above him with their dust and thirst before he ever came to
that city again--the young man sang it as he passed the gate, and was now
dead with his wife a thousand years.

"I cannot sleep for that abominable song," the body cried to the soul.

"Then do as you are commanded," the soul replied. And wearily the body
took a pen again. Then the soul spoke merrily as he looked through the
window. "There is a mountain lifting sheer above London, part crystal and
part myst. Thither the dreamers go when the sound of the traffic has
fallen. At first they scarcely dream because of the roar of it, but before
midnight it stops, and turns, and ebbs with all its wrecks. Then the
dreamers arise and scale the shimmering mountain, and at its summit find
the galleons of dream. Thence some sail East, some West, some into the
Past and some into the Future, for the galleons sail over the years as
well as over the spaces, but mostly they head for the Past and the olden
harbours, for thither the sighs of men are mostly turned, and the
dream-ships go before them, as the merchantmen before the continual
trade-winds go down the African coast. I see the galleons even now raise
anchor after anchor; the stars flash by them; they slip out of the night;
their prows go gleaming into the twilight of memory, and night soon lies
far off, a black cloud hanging low, and faintly spangled with stars, like
the harbour and shore of some low-lying land seen afar with its harbour
lights."

Dream after dream that soul related as he sat there by the window. He told
of tropical forests seen by unhappy men who could not escape from London,
and never would--forests made suddenly wondrous by the song of some
passing bird flying to unknown eyries and singing an unknown song. He saw
the old men lightly dancing to the tune of elfin pipes--beautiful dances
with fantastic maidens--all night on moonlit imaginary mountains; he heard
far off the music of glittering Springs; he saw the fairness of blossoms
of apple and may thirty years fallen; he heard old voices--old tears came
glistening back; Romance sat cloaked and crowned upon southern hills, and
the soul knew him.

One by one he told the dreams of all that slept in that street. Sometimes
he stopped to revile the body because it worked badly and slowly. Its
chill fingers wrote as fast as they could, but the soul cared not for
that. And so the night wore on till the soul heard tinkling in Oriental
skies far footfalls of the morning.

"See now," said the soul, "the dawn that the dreamers dread. The sails of
light are paling on those unwreckable galleons; the mariners that steer
them slip back into fable and myth; that other sea the traffic is turning
now at its ebb, and is about to hide its pallid wrecks, and to come
swinging back, with its tumult, at the flow. Already the sunlight flashes
in the gulfs behind the east of the world; the gods have seen it from
their palace of twilight that the built above the sunrise; they warm their
hands at its glow as it streams through their gleaming arches, before it
reaches the world; all the gods are there that have ever been, and all the
gods that shall be; they sit there in the morning, chanting and praising
Man."

"I am numb and very cold for want of sleep," said the body.

"You shall have centuries of sleep," said the soul, "but you must not
sleep now, for I have seen deep meadows with purple flowers flaming tall
and strange above the brilliant grass, and herds of pure white unicorns
that gambol there for joy, and a river running by with a glittering
galleon on it, all of gold, that goes from an unknown inland to an unknown
isle of the sea to take a song from the King of Over-the-Hills to the
Queen of Far-Away.

"I will sing that song to you, and you shall write it down."

"I have toiled for you for years," the body said. "Give me now but one
night's rest, for I am exceeding weary."

"Oh, go and rest. I am tired of you. I am off," said the soul.

And he arose and went, we know not whither. But the body they laid in the
earth. And the next night at midnight the wraiths of the dead came
drifting from their tombs to felicitate that body.

"You are free here, you know," they said to their new companion.

"Now I can rest," said the body.

FINIS

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